Nordic Semiconductor has announced the nRF52840, a Bluetooth-5-ready system on chip (SoC) for smart home and advanced wearables applications, as well as industrial sensors and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Built on the existing nRF52 Series architectures, the nRF52840 SoC employs a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4F processor clocked at 64 MHz and offers hardware enhancements including a generic CPU; floating point, and DSP performance; 1 MB of Flash memory and 256 kB of RAM memory; the ARM CryptoCell-310 cryptographic accelerator plus crypto ciphers and key generation and storage options; a new radio architecture with on-chip power analysis (PA); support for Bluetooth 5, 802.15.4, ANT, and proprietary 2.4 GHz wireless technologies; a USB 2.0 controller; and a host of peripherals (many with EasyDMA) including a quad-SPI interface. The nRF52840 can also operate from power supplies above 5V, such as re-chargeable battery power sources.

"With ARM CryptoCell hardware on-chip we are equipping developers with the very best-in-class hardware and software security options to build secure products,” said Thomas Bonnerud, Director of Product Management at Nordic Semiconductor. “The nRF52840 SoC with its hardware enhancements, Bluetooth 5 range and bandwidth improvements, and 802.15.4 support, is the latest embodiment of that intention."

The introduction of the nRF52840 SoC will be accompanied by the release of the S140 SoftDevice RF protocol software stack. The S140 SoftDevice is a Bluetooth 5-compliant software stack with support for the long range and high data throughput features of Bluetooth 5.

Nordic will release its S140 SoftDevice and associated nRF5 SDK with support for Bluetooth 5 long-range and high-throughput modes upon ratification of the Bluetooth 5 standard in early December. Engineering samples and development kits are available to order from Nordic's global distribution network. Production variants of the nRF52840 will be available in Q4 2017.